‘Contagion’ creepy, but suffers from too many characters

Kate Winslet as Dr. Erin Mears and Larry Clark as Dave in a scene from the worldwide pandemic thriller “Contagion.”

Warner Bros.

If there’s ever a movie that will give you a queasy, sinking feeling, it’s “Contagion,” which arrives just in time for the gear-up to the flu season.

This is a movie that gives actresses a chance to take off their makeup, look really terrible and die with a dramatic flourish as they play the victims of a seemingly unstoppable (at least at first) worldwide pandemic.

Fittingly, the very first thing coming from the screen in “Contagion” is a cough. As more and more people fall victim to the strange, uncontrollable ailment whose origins, we eventually learn, were spread from a bat to a pig, one is certain to have his ears pealed in the theater, hoping not to hear a hacking cough. That fear was used most effectively in the last pandemic movie, 1995’s “Outbreak,” in which the deadly virus was spread by someone coughing in a movie theater. Obviously “Contagion” wasn’t the first viral terror movie. Before “Outbreak” there were “The Satan Bug” and “The Andromeda Strain,” to name two of the more famous.

It’s creepy and scary, but it suffers as many of these wide-scale films do by having too many characters spread across too many continents to make it truly gripping. When the numbers of its victims spread into the multimillions, it becomes more of an abstraction. Of course that’s why “Contagion” concentrates on a cross-section sample of those touched by the virus. But even then there are too many stories unfolding at once.

Director Steven Soderbergh has had success with multi-character, multi-star stories before, most notably in the “Ocean’s 11,” “12” and “13” series. But those were told with the main focus on a few of the characters. That’s attempted in “Contagion” too, but not as well. Matt Damon, who starred in all three “Ocean’s” films, has the more or less central role in “Contagion” as Mitch Emhoff, whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is the first victim. He is a survivor and desperately tries to keep his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) safe from the disease. But though Mitch’s story is compelling and has deeper layers, it’s still one of several.

Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who wrote Soderbergh’s underappreciated “The Informant!” which also starred Damon, as well as Damon’s “The Bourne Ultimatum,” leaps across the planet to tell the story. Hong Kong, Macao, Minneapolis, Geneva, Tokyo, Chicago and Atlanta, where Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) at the Centers for Disease Control is trying to unravel the mystery and gets into trouble for allowing his own emotions to color his judgment.

Other principal characters include Kate Winslet as a gutsy, dedicated CDC epidemic analyst who puts herself at risk to find an answer. Jude Law is the character you grow to love to hate, an Internet blogger who spreads panic worldwide and gives hope to the hopeless about an untested homeopathic “cure” called Forsythia as he spreads distrust of scientists and government efforts to control the disease. Jennifer Ehle is Ally, a pragmatic researcher hoping to break the virus’s genetic code in a laboratory with the help of some monkeys. Marion Cotillard is a doctor from the World Health Organization who travels to an infected village in the outreaches of Hong Kong and can’t get out. Sometimes there’s such a long wait between appearances for some of their characters that by the time they turn up again, they seem an intrusion. Winslet and Law create the strongest characters, but from opposite ends of the spectrum.

“Contagion” is an epic story without an epic scale. One gauges the effects of the worldwide panic in a few scenes of mob violence: the looting of a supermarket, a raid on a pharmacy, a riot at a food distribution area. And the resolution seems too quick, even though it’s supposed to take place over more than four months.

Soderbergh toys with the audience in showing how the virus is spread, focusing his camera on people coughing into their hands, then touching things –– elevator buttons, doorknobs, cell phones, cocktail glasses, each other. It’s designed to make one a little nervous or at least self-conscious about ever touching anything or anyone again. And you can shake on that.

***Contagion

Starring: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Anna Jacoby-Heron.